The Responsibility of the World's Largest Publisher

I almost put this into the previous post, but thought it was really a separate topic. Although corporate managers often want to claim that the only interest of a company should be making profit, that's an incomplete and unrealistic view of the world. Any business has stakeholders - investors, employees, business partners, and communities - that have a variety of interests. A responsible business cannot simply ignore the environment, for example, because nonjudicial acts can promote economic disaster from ecological disaster.

When a company like Google becomes prominent in its field - publishing information - it takes on a responsibility because people will rely on what they find. That's what makes this story about the replacement of post-Hurricane Katrina images with some before the storm so disquieting. As the AP story says:

Swapping the post-Katrina images and the ruin they revealed for others showing an idyllic city dumbfounded many locals and even sparked suspicions that the company and civic leaders were conspiring to portray the area's recovery progressing better than it really is.

Whether fueled by economic interests or desire for power, this comes uncomfortably close to the rewriting of history in George Orwell's 1984. Change something in the database and suddenly you've altered views of "reality" in real time. Again, according to the story:

John Hanke, Google's director for maps and satellite imagery, said "a combination of factors including imagery date, resolution, and clarity" go into deciding what imagery to provide.

One might hope that truth and accuracy would become significant factors before people relying on the company's information offerings unknowingly take part in a rewriting of the past.